I saw another one on CNN today. Anderson Cooper was standing beside a black woman with a baby strapped to her back and one stumbled out of the doorway of the hut behind them. The cameraman must have noticed because he adjusted the camera ever so slightly to the right. Without the door in the frame I could no longer see the thing, but I’m sure it bumbled off to the side of the house in search of its next meal. The undead are always in the never-ending search for a meal.

I sigh as I turned off the television. It just isn’t worth it anymore. You can only spread the knowledge for so long before you are likened to the crazy man on the corner screaming about Christ’s second coming. This winter there were thousands. They took over Tahrir Square in Cairo. I immediately called my eldest son, Ronald. “Dad, those are just people. Really angry people suppressed by a dictator for decades. I wish you’d let me call Dr. Lowenstein.” I hung up with a sigh shortly after he said that. Foolish boy. What would he do with my granddaughters when it all happened? A few years ago they came to visit, two little blonde dolls. The oldest girl, Cadence, has spunk. She would be a fighter. No need to worry about her, I suppose.

I make my way to the basement door and turn on the light. It hesitates before it comes on: one of the negative results from the solar panels I installed on the roof last year, but I can live with that. It’s more important to be prepared. Walking down the stairs I’m careful not to trip over the cases of bottled water that sit on each step as I mutter to myself. I’m not sure when the habit started, maybe when Roseanne left me last year? She was naïve, but I’d loved her for forty years. Without her nagging, the house had grown quiet, so I suppose I try to fill the silence.

Back in the seventies when I was protesting the lumber industry in the redwood forests in California, I had seen a man talking to himself and it made me uncomfortable. He was an old hiker who had made a home many stories up in a redwood. A greasy, hairy mountain man, he had been chained to a tree for so long that insanity had seeped into his brain. I suppose since the man slept in the branches of the tree which he had chained himself to, he was probably crazy already. Back then, him sitting there muttering to himself about dreams and nothingness seemed crazy. I didn’t recognize the words then, but now I think of him every time I slip Elton’s Yellow Brick Road album onto the phonograph.

If there is one luxury item I can’t live without, it is music. If there is another, it is literature. Because of this, next to my overstuffed chair in my basement I have two bookshelves. One has hundreds of records, everything from Janis Joplin to AC/DC to Billy Joel. A windup phonograph is more reliable if my solar panels don’t do their job, and some music just sounds better with the imperfections of a 45. The other bookshelf has my favorites. Among them are classics like Moby Dick and Pride and Prejudice as well as everything C.S. Lewis, J.D. Salinger and J.R.R. Tolkien ever wrote. I figure if I end up locked in this basement alone for a year, at least I’ll have Mr. Darcy and Tumnus to keep me company.

Roseanne never believed me. I showed her video after video. Documentaries of Vietnam always seemed to have a few of them in the background. She just said it was dirt on a man’s face. She said sometimes people do manage to walk around for a while with half of their head missing, like a chicken at slaughter. And then she would chastise me for wasting our money and being obsessed with horror movie monsters. If there was anyone I wanted to convince, it was her. I don’t know where she is now, but I pray she keeps a weapon nearby even if she still doesn’t believe. When we were married, I insisted on two axes leaning against our bedframe. She hated them, and I always knew when she had cleaned the bedroom floors, because I would have to go retrieve the axes from the shed again.

I lean back in my chair and look at the photo on the top of the bookshelf. The only record I want to keep of life before it began is a photo from our wedding. Before I knew the truth, before she started accusing me of being crazy. Back then I brought home roses for her every day after work. I know that seems sappy sweet, but actually it was because I walked through a rose garden on my way home and I would snip one off when no one was looking. An old hippy’s way of bucking the system, I suppose. Don’t tell me not to walk on the grass.

I pull my notebook off the shelf and record the date and time of the Anderson Cooper recording on CNN underneath the one from Cairo a few months ago. I started this about ten years ago, and the notebooks have piled up. By my calculations the virus originated somewhere in Asia. The numbers increased in China in the eighties. They really picked up speed as they spread through Africa in the late nineties. Because so many people stopped traveling after 9/11, they remained isolated in the Middle East for a few years. But in 2005 they began to pick up speed again. I hypothesize that they hit Eastern Europe last year, but it is hard to determine for sure since all of the live news recordings come out the Middle East right now. If I’m correct, they’ll hit America any day now, but of course the media will cover it up for a while before they reach little towns like mine. I’m not on the outskirt of a city. I live in a field on the outskirt of another field. It takes me four hours to drive to a movie theater from where I live. This was a strategic move on my part. And one more reason Roseanne left.

I place my notebook back on the shelf and head back up the stairs. For as long as I can, I want to live in the rest of the house. I know that once it all begins, I’ll be isolated in my basement. I trip a little on the bottom step. Seems my depth perception has gone in recent months. I suppose that’s just another sign of age.

I only make it halfway up my stairs before I hear it. A shuffle, a moan. I reach for one of the weapons that I have stored on hooks above the stair railing. Tightly gripping the handle of a machete I take another step up the stairs. This is it. The day has come. I am careful to avoid the middle of the step, because I know it will creak. I hear it again. That noise. Are my old ears deceiving me, or has the day finally come? The event I have prepared for most of my adult life. The event that had lost me my wife. The reason my kids stopped coming to visit. In the back of my mind I try to remember if I have left my Beatles White Album in my upstairs phonograph. I don’t want to be trapped in the basement without it.

At the top of the stairs I can see the front door. There is movement outside of it. I wish, for the first time, that I own a gun, but I know the machete was my best bet anyway. Guns don’t affect them, or at least that’s what all the books say. Dismemberment is more affective because the dead can’t die again. But if they are ripped to pieces all over the yard, they have a harder time running after you. As the shadow passes by the picture window, I wonder if it is trampling Roseanne’s tulips. They just began to sprout last week. This year’s late snows held them back.

The deadbolt is latched. As long as the back door is also latched, I am okay for a time. They aren’t very bright. They don’t pick locks, and they don’t have the dexterity to remove window screens. They can only enter through brute force, and as long as they don’t know I’m in here, they won’t do that. Like dogs, they are motivated purely by food. I inch my way toward the door, the heavy breathing of the shadow looming beyond the curtain sends my heart racing. Perhaps a man with a wife and children to defend would be filled with a primitive anger, adrenaline driving his movement. I am filled only with fear as I pull back the curtain on the door.

There are two eyes staring in my window at me. It takes me a few moments to realize that they aren’t human. But they aren’t undead human either. It is only a grizzly bear. I let out a huge sigh of relief as he lumbers away. I chuckle to myself as I head to the second floor to grab the White Album. Today may not be the day, but I know it is coming. I’ll be damned if I’m going a year without listening Helter Skelter.

Katrina Kent is a writer and poet from the coast of Maine and is currently enrolled in the Creative Writing BFA Program at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. She discovered a love of the written word at a very young age and never looked back. Katrina has previously had non-fiction articles published by Independent Publishing in local magazines. Katrina is pursuing a career as a teacher and a writer.

Art/Photo Credit: A derivative work of a photograph by Alvimann courtesy of morguefile.com.